Mezzenzana 2018 Ethos

AN ECOLOGY OF SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION 275
Encountering Supai: An Ecology of Spiritual

Perception in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Francesca Mezzenzana
Abstract In this article I set out to draw an “ecology” of spiritual perception among the Runa of the
Ecuadorian Amazon. In particular, I look at the ways in which supai beings—forest spirits—are perceived by
the Runa through two main sensory modalities: smelling and dreaming. Inspired by recent advances in the
anthropology of religious learning, I then explore how certain Runa people—those who have undertaken a
bodily training known as sasi—are more likely than others to encounter supai beings. This ritual training is
conceived as corporeal learning. I conclude by suggesting that attention and self-attention developed during
such corporeal practices play a central role in the perception of forest spirits. [spirits, perception, attention,
learning, Amazonia]
Résumé Dans cet article, je décris une «écologie» de la perception spirituelle chez les Runa de l’Amazonie
équatorienne. En particulier, je regarde les manières dont les supai— les esprits de la forêt—sont perçus par
le Runa à travers deux principales modalités sensorielles: l’odorat et le rêve. Inspiré par les progrès récents de
l’anthropologie de l’apprentissage religieux, j’explore aussi comment certains Runa—ceux qui ont entrepris un
entraı̂nement corporel connu sous le nom de sasi—sont plus susceptibles que d’autres de rencontrer des supai.
Cette formation rituelle est conçue comme un apprentissage du corps. Je conclus en suggérant que l’attention
développée au cours de telles pratiques corporelles joue un rôle central dans la perception des esprits des forêts.
[esprits, perception, attention, apprentissage, Amazonie]
Resumen En este documento delineo una ‘ecologı́a’ de percepción espiritual entre los Runa de la Amazonı́a
Ecuatoriana. En particular, observo las formas en que los supai, espı́ritus del bosque, son percibidos por los
Runa a través de dos modalidades sensoriales: oler y soñar. Inspirado por recientes teorı́as en la antropologı́a
del aprendizaje religioso, este trabajo explora cómo algunos Runa—aquellos que han llevado a cabo una
formación ritual conocida como sasi —tienen más probabilidades que otros de encontrarse con los supai.
Estas practicas rituales se conciben como un aprendizaje corporal. Concluyo sugiriendo que la atención y la
auto-atención desarrolladas durante tales prácticas corporales juegan un papel central en la percepción de los
espı́ritus del bosque. [espı́ritus, percepción, atención, aprendizaje, Amazonia]
Early on during my fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Pablo, the son of the woman I
was living with at the time, disappeared in the forest. He was found only three days later,
laying naked in a remote part of the forest, in a state of mental confusion. He claimed to have
been following the smell of a supai woman (forest woman) who had appeared in his dreams
lately. While I found the episode disconcerting at the time, I soon learned that experiences
like that of Pablo, if not an everyday experience, are quite common among the Runa, an
ETHOS, Vol. 46, Issue 2, pp. 275–295, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352.
C 2018 by the American Anthropological
Association All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12197
276 ETHOS
indigenous people living in the region of Pastaza, in Ecuador, with whom I have worked
since 2011.1 Indeed, my fieldwork soon became interspersed with stories of quasi abduction
and seduction of humans by what the Runa call supai, forest beings.
In the pages that follow I try to make sense of such experiences. This attempt at understanding
requires me to start from the very beginning, to the foundations which render such an
experience possible. While I do not aim to provide an answer to the puzzle posed by Pablo’s
experience, I make a first step in the direction of trying to understand how Runa people
come to perceive forest spirits. Drawing on recent works on the phenomenology of spiritual
experience (Blanes and Espirito Santo 2013; Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2011), I will explore
the specific sensory modalities through which supai beings are experienced: dreaming and
smelling. Focusing on the specific context in which spirits are perceived, I will offer an
ecology of the perception of spiritual beings. Such ecology, I will show, is grounded in
the practical activities of hunting, gathering, and walking in the forest. Finally, through
an analysis of a ritual training known as sasi, I will argue that the perception of supai is
inextricably linked to local understanding of bodily transformation and learning.
Perceiving Spirits
The Runa describe supai as human-looking spirits which inhabit lagoons, mountains, or
remote parts of the forest. Some supai are the “masters” of certain animals, plants or features
of the landscape, those in charge of their well-being and reproduction. Supai can be gruesome
and scary, with exaggerated bodily features, like ogres or dwarfs, while others are stunningly
beautiful, with dark eyes and beautiful long hair. Often supai are described as foreign-looking
people with elegant business suits or feathered headdresses and facial painting associated with
other neighboring indigenous tribes. Some forest spirits look just like Runa people, but with
extraordinary features (exceedingly long hair, military suits, etc.). All supai can speak Runa
shimi, the native language of the Runa as well as many others. Supai “culture” is distinctively
human: they drink manioc beer and eat game meat, they build houses with thatched roofs,
they have drinking parties and festivals. Supai are thought to live in underground caves,
mountain hills, or inside giant ceiba trees located in remote hunting territories (purina).
Often a day-long trek, such territories are situated far from the villages, either deep in the
forest or downriver. Each family in the area I worked owns a purina territory where they go
hunting.2 Going to purina is a fundamental practice for learning about the forest (sacha) as
well as the spirits’ world. It is by walking through this landscape punctuated by rivers, steep
hills, animal footsteps, and smells that children learn to see and trace the passage of a solitary
peccary or become aware of the habits of a hummingbird. It is in these parts of the forest
that the Runa sometimes perceive a supai.
What exactly does it mean to perceive a spirit? Recently, a number of works in the anthro-
pology of religion have attempted to engage in what Cassaniti and Luhrmann (2011) defined
as “a phenomenology of spiritual experience,” a comparative account of the ways in which
spiritual entities are sensorially apprehended. Inspired by such endeavor, my approach in this
article can be seen as an attempt to look at spiritual experience “working backward,” as Ruy
Blanes and Diana Espirito-Santo (2013, 6) aptly put it: I seek, in their words, to “understand
the existence of particular ontological beings or entities as defined and refracted through the
pragmatics of their effects in and on the world” (7). By paying attention to the pragmatic cir-
cumstances in which spiritual experiences occur, I aim to delineate an “ecology” of spiritual
experience, one which takes into account the multiplicity of factors shaping the experience
of supai encounters.
Before proceeding any further, I wish to spend a few words on the meaning of “experience”
as well as on the methodology to tackle spiritual “experiences.” In a critical essay on the
concept of experience, Jason Throop stresses a “complemental model of experience that is
grounded in the organization of attention according to the dynamic structuring of what is
foregrounded and backgrounded in awareness” (2003, 234–235). Drawing on the works of
William James, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz, Throop suggests seeing experience as
both the “immediacy of temporal flux” (233) in which are present past and future perspectives
and the moment of reflective assessment where “experience” is thought upon. He also notices
how different field methodologies may grasp experience in its different temporal articula-
tions: in the moment in which experience is explicitly articulated (for instance, in interviews)
or during the unfolding of the event itself (which can be thus recorded only through ob-
servation). During my fieldwork, I deployed methodologies which captured different kinds
of “experience.” I was present in many instances immediately after supai encounters when
people came back home feeling sick or scared. I also observed many of the ritual practices
known as sasi which take place on almost a daily basis. However, due to the solitary nature
of supai encounters (of which I will explain later), such encounters could not be directly
witnessed by the ethnographer. The experience of supai, with its rich sensorial description,
always emerged by communicating with others. This, as I will show later, is necessarily so:
for the Runa to do otherwise—that is, to maintain a solitary, subjective experience of supai
encounter—would mean surrendering to the spirit world.
To return to my proposed ecology of spiritual experience: my approach starts from a simple

premise: that “spiritual conceptions are not simply expressed in activity . . . rather, they
subsist in the flow of activity” (Willerslev 2007, 156). As a number of scholars in the anthro-
pology of religion have argued, religious or spiritual experience cannot be considered as a
matter of abstract belief or representational content but rather as something which emerges
from within the materiality of everyday engagements (Keane 2008; Meyer and Houtman
2012).
This approach prompts the question of the relationship between perception and spiritual
entities. How does God—or any “other-worldy” being—become manifested in the tex-
ture of everyday life? In an article exploring the perception of religious value, philosopher
Nathaniel Barrett (2013) suggests that, in order to think about spiritual experience, we need
to rethink the very meaning of perceiving. Drawing upon James Gibson’s work and theo-
ries of embodied cognition, Barrett argues that rather than as a matter of “construction,”
perception should be thought of as a process of “discrimination.” While in the former case,
meaning is added on top of an objective reality “out there,” in the second case, meaning is
278 ETHOS
intrinsic to the very act of perceiving. Religious meaning in his view is not something we
“add” on top of reality but rather is intrinsic to reality itself. This perspective is radical in so
far as it does not merely claim that environmental states (the “outside” world) affect mental
states (“the self”), but rather it attempts to make the distinction between the two purposeless
in the first place (Wilson and Golonka 2013). It also prompts us to reconsider standard
anthropological understandings of environmental perception which, in the words of Tim
Ingold, tend to assume that this consists of “a cultural construction of nature, or as the
superimposition of layers of ‘emic’ significance upon an independently given, ‘etic’ reality”
(2000, 20).
This analytical shift has two consequences. First, by making the distinction between mental
states and the “outside” environment meaningless, it questions the nature of reality. In
the case of religious experience, this means, as Tanya Luhrmann writes in her work with
Evangelical Christians, that believers “are not simply modelling the world according to
different cognitive constraints [but that] in some fundamental sense, they live in a different
world, which provides them with different evidence for their cognitive models than the
secular observer may have” (2007, 99). The second related consequence regards the issue of
learning to perceive spiritual entities. As Ingold (2001) aptly put it, perception is primarily
an “education of attention” (see Gibson 1979, 254). If that is the case then, how does one
learn to pay attention to spirits? This is a question which has recently emerged forcefully
within anthropology (Berliner and Sarró 2007; Halloy and Naumescu 2012). The issue has
been tackled previously by cognitive anthropologists who, in their work, focused on the
mechanisms which underpinned the transmission of religious beliefs (Boyer 1994; Sperber
1996). While recognizing the importance of such works, the recent anthropological approach
to spiritual learning differs from them because it is primarily interested in the experiential
aspect of religion. For instance, acknowledging that religious learning “is not merely a
cold-blooded technical process of cognitive downloading” (Berliner and Sarró 2007, 10)
but rather one which takes place in an intersubjective and cultural space, such research is
interested in exploring the process by which people learn to feel and perceive the presence of
God and other spiritual beings. Despite the self-evident fact that religion, as any other social
process, is “learned,” Naumescu and Halloy rightly observed that “very few anthropologists
considered the pragmatic conditions of transmission, that is the way contextual factors shape
cognitive, perceptual and emotional processes” (2012, 166).
This remark also stands true in Amazonia where ethnography abounds with descriptions
of encounters with nonhuman “invisible others.” Such others form part of what has been
commonly described as an “animistic” or “perspectivist” landscape where animals, plants,
spirits, and objects are attributed with (human-like) personhood and point of view.3 Spirits
figure prominently within the cosmology of Amazonian indigenous people and are often
described in relation to shamanism, dreaming, and other ritual contexts (Chaumeil 1983;
Grotti and Brightman 2016; Fausto 2008; Kopenawa and Albert 2010; Viveiros de Castro
2010). Despite the centrality of the spirit world, there is, however, relatively little on the
phenomenological aspect of such encounters and even less on the experience of learning to
perceive spirits. As Fernando Santos-Granero, one of the anthropologists most interested in
exploring Amazonian sensorial experiences, points out: “scholars of perspectivism have not
explored the sensorial dimension of this phenomenon of perspectivism, except to state that
Amerindians attribute to animals, spirits, and other nonhuman beings the same cognitive and
sensory faculties that they possess” (2006, 76). Yet some exceptions in the region demonstrate
this to be a fruitful research path. For instance, Bernd Brabec de Mori (2012), working among
the Peruvian Shipibo, describes how “voice-masking”—a technique by which ritual experts
assume the voice of a nonhuman other—is a central tool for experiencing transformation
into a nonhuman. Similarly, Andrea Gutierrez Choquevilca (2016) suggests that the process
of mimicking nonhuman voices during ritual singing plays a central role, from a cognitive
and pragmatic perspective, in the transmission of certain animistic representations among
the Runa of the Peruvian Amazon. From a linguistic perspective, Pierre Déléage (2009) has
analyzed how the substitution of evidential marking which occurs during shamanic initiation
among the Peruvian Sharanahua enables the shaman to switch to a cognitive modality for
which what is being enunciated is perceived as “true.” Shifting away from “the descriptive
and explanatory quality of narratives” (Brabec de Mori 2012, 98), all these works point to
the pragmatics which shape the perception of the spirit world as well as the importance of
experience in the process of “learning” animism. It is exactly this pragmatic approach to
experience which also guides my attempt to understand spirit perception among the Runa.
To return to my original ethnographic question: what does it mean, for the Runa, to perceive
a supai? In the next pages, I will attempt to answer this question by purposefully taking a
long route. I first look at the sensorial modalities through which supai beings are perceived
in the depths of the rainforest. The Runa are very explicit with regards to the perception of
supai: if you see (ricunata) a supai during wake life, you will instantly die. Seeing a supai with
ordinary vision is a real impossibility: thus, the existence of supai beings can only be accessed
through other sensorial modalities. Rather than invisible, it would be more correct to state,
as Grégory Delaplace notices in his work on the perception of ghosts among Mongolian
herders, that supai spirits “are perceivable only by some people, in certain contexts, and
in a particular way” (2013, 52). Spirit encounters are thus governed by a specific “regime
of communication” (Delaplace 2013; see also Taylor 1993) which differs from any other
nonhuman-human exchange.
In their descriptions of supai encounters, the Runa emphasize two sensory modalities over
others through which they come to know supai beings: smelling and dreaming.4 I will
explore these modalities in the first sections of this article. I will then look at one par-
ticular condition which is necessary for any supai encounter to take place: being alone.
Finally, I will consider the important question of why some Runa people are more sus-
ceptible to supai encounters than others. This ethnographic observation directly feeds
into the question how one learns to perceive supai beings. Why do some people hap-
pen to experience forest beings more than others? Answering these questions will force
us to take into account local understanding of the self and learning and push the limits
of what an ecological approach to spiritual experience should include. But before antic-
ipating too much, let us now turn to the pragmatics of the sensorial experience of supai
beings.
280 ETHOS
Smell Like a Supai Spirit

Throughout my fieldwork, I have come to greatly appreciate Runa ability to perceive and
discriminate between different kinds of smell. When in the forest, Runa children often lean
over a tree, sniffing the humid bark to then whisper to each other with a satisfied grin: “A
deer has been here!” I sometimes bent forward and inhaled too, but smelled nothing, or at
least nothing different from the mixture of moss and putrescent leaves which impregnates
the forest. During our treks, my Runa hosts seemed to be able to detect a variety of different
odors, from the sweet scent of rotten fruits to the pungent smell of tapir sweat. All these are
referred to by the Runa with the same term: asna.
Smell is for the Runa an important sensorial modality in everyday life, but it is even more
important when it comes to perceiving nonhuman agents such as spirits and ghosts. For
instance, one day I was sitting with my host brother Jairo and sister Eva and their cousins
when suddenly Jairo stopped talking and asked: “What is this smell?” We all paused for a
second. A light smell of burnt plastic was lingering in the room. Jairo urged his younger
cousin to go to the kitchen to check if something was burning in the fireplace, but it turned
out this was empty. The smell concentrated in the precise spot we were sitting, stayed there
for a minute, and then vanished. For Jairo, Eva, and his cousins, this was the evident sign a
ghost had just passed by. Indeed, a smell whose source could not be directly located, is often
considered to be a manifestation of the presence of an invisible entity like a ghost (aya) or a
forest spirit (supai).
However, unlike the case of ghosts—which, as we will see, have a distinct ontological status
from spirits—in encounters with forest spirits it is not only the “suddenness” which prompts
the Runa to identify such olfactory experiences as uncanny but also the quality of the smell
perceived. Indeed, not all sudden smells are taken as the troublesome appearance of supai
beings. Forest spirits are generally thought to manifest themselves in two distinct ways: in
the form of a revolting smell of rotten meat or animal sweat or, alternatively, as an enticing
scent, something likened to the smell of blossoming flowers or industrial perfume. While
both are associated with the presence of supai, these types of smells are thought to produce
distinct effects. In the first case, the foul odor causes a state of illness (huayra) in the person
who senses it, while in the second circumstance, the smell is thought to seduce the human
person into a relationship with the spirit.
The first case is very common. Most Runa people I know have, at some stage, experienced
a state of huayra which was attributed to the encounter with a supai. For instance, Flavio, a
good friend of mine and the son of a neighbor in the village, once returned from a hunting
trip feeling dizzy and weak. He recounted that, as he was chasing a white-lipped peccary, the
animal entered a hole underground. He followed him in the underground cave, although he
was aware it was a dangerous move. As Flavio stepped into the hole, he suddenly smelled a
very “strong odor” (sinchi asna) which was “like tapir sweat but much stronger.” He described
how the smell made him feel dizzy, and his head began “going in circles” (uma muyuhuan).
He rushed outside to avoid fainting in the underground hole. When Flavio came back with
nausea and a strong headache, he and his family had no doubt about what had happened:
Flavio had encountered the owner of white-lipped peccaries, who lives underground with
his army of peccaries and he had tried to take his life. The foul smell permeated Flavio’s
body and left him debilitated.
Cases such as Flavio’s are usually healed with a ritual known as huayrata anchuchina which
is performed by an old knowledgeable person. The ritual involves the burning and smoking
of tobacco, the manipulation of some fragrant leaves (tsuan panga and asnac panga), and the
use of industrial perfume. The healer begins by cutting some pieces of a dark palm wood
called chonta and places them into the fire until they become carbonized. Meanwhile he or
she lights up a tobacco cigar and smokes it all over the patient’s body. The kitchen, the place
where the ritual usually takes place, soon becomes filled with the smell of wood and tobacco
smoke. Then the healer grabs the leafy branches of tsuan panga and asnac panga and begins to
whip the patient’s body with them. She puts some perfume in his mouth and blows it in the
air. Smoking tobacco and spitting perfume onto the patient’s head, she then rubs the body
with the carbonized wood. Leaning forward, she heavily breathes onto the corona—the top
of the head which is conceived as a fundamental point of passage of breaths, substances, and
smells.5 Although such rituals vary in the kind of materials used or in the sequence of actions
undertaken, they all terminate with a specific gesture performed by the healer in the midst
of tobacco smoke and aromatic vapors whereby he sniffs the head of the sick person and says
aloud: “Phuuuu! Asnac man!” (It stinks!). Sometimes family members join in the sniffing, and
each person takes turn sniffing the patient’s head and expressing disgust. This concluding
passage is fundamental as the foul smell emanating from the patient’s head is the tangible
proof that the illness has indeed been caused by a supai. The sickness is thought to gradually
leave the body under the form of a foul smell. Healing sessions are usually repeated until
this fetid odor ceases to be excreted from the person’s head.
As Glenn Shepard reports for the Matsigenka and the Yora of the Peruvian Amazon, smell
appears as a central sensor modality through which healing is accomplished. In particular, the
Runa seem to subscribe to a “pneumatic–allopathic theory of efficacy” (2004, 253) whereby
each material exhales an odor which displaces the one left by the supai. During the healing,
the odor of smoke, tobacco, perfume, and carbon are explicitly described as counteracting
the foul smell which affected the sick body. As a research participant aptly put it, the healing
ritual is a real “therapy through smell” (terapia a través del olor). The healing seems to work
by enacting the same principle governing the process of getting sick. Just like supai smell
is said to engender in the person a state of “trauma,” during healing sessions the illness gets
“traumatized” by the strong smell of tobacco, perfume, and the aroma of burnt wood and is
induced to leave the body. This understanding is in line with Runa belief that supai beings
are repelled by certain human odors such as tobacco. For instance, Runa people who live in
the city often irrigate the borders of their backyard garden with toilet detergent as a means
to prevent supai from entering the house. Supai beings are also said to “dislike” urban areas
because they cannot stand the smell of gasoline produced by cars. Likewise, during healing
rituals, the illness caused by supai is described as “becoming disoriented and drunk” because
of the strong smell of tobacco and of other substances and finally comes out of the body.
282 ETHOS
What I would like to draw attention to, now, is the way in which smell is conceived to affect
one’s interior state. To do so, I will look at the second type of smell which is taken as a
manifestation of supai agency: the case of enticing smell. As mentioned earlier, supai do not
only make their appearance through a sudden foul smell but also under the form of a fragrant
perfume which resembles eau de Cologne. Usually, this smell is associated with a supai who
wants to seduce and kidnap a human person. This was the experience of Juan, a 20-year-old
Runa man who entertained for a few months a relationship with a supai woman. He first
became aware of her presence in the forest when he perceived an enticing smell during a
hunting trip. He could not figure out where it came from, since no other human person
was around. The smell—a mixture of industrial perfume and deodorant—kept following
him, “just like a human person.” In the stories he recounted about the supai woman, he
remembered her sweet scent and described its effects on him using a telling expression:
“Uma muyuhan,” which literally means “my head goes in circles.” As one might recall, this is
the same expression used by Flavio to describe the sensation he experienced when he chased
the peccary in the underground hole.
Significantly, expressions such as “my head goes in circles” or “trauma,” which are used to
describe the experiences of smelling supai beings, are also commonly deployed to denote the
effects of drinking ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi, the hallucinogenic vine used in shamanic
rituals) and alcohol consumption. Indeed, in his story, Juan alternated the expression “trau-
mado” (traumatised) with the adjective “machashca” which literally means “drunk” and again
is used to describe the state of dizziness and confusion caused by both the ingestion of
ayahuasca and alcohol. What I wish to suggest here is that all these three states—the olfac-
tory experience of supai, ayahuasca drinking, and alcohol consumption—while different from
each other, share a common characteristic: they are contexts where “normal” perception
fails.
Take for instance, the drinking of the hallucinogenic vine known as ayahuasca. For the Runa,
the ritual drinking of ayahuasca is a primary means to access a reality which is not readily
visible.6 Seeing through ayahuasca is being witness to another world, a reality known as ucu
pacha, “the time and space of the supai” (Viteri 1993, 149). In this world, animals and plants
show their human form and hills and caves reveal a geography of subterranean metropoles
inhabited by a variety of supai. During the visions, the drinker meets other nonhuman beings,
exchanges knowledge with them, and can know the future. Such experiences are highly valued
sources of knowledge about the world. To gain the clearer visions of ayahuasca, however,
one has to abandon everyday perception and enter a state of exceptional visionary and
auditory perception. This transition—from the ingestion of the hallucinogenic liquid to the
moment in which “normal” perception is abandoned—is defined as “machai japisha,” literally,
“becoming drunk.” It is described as a moment where vision becomes blurry and thousands
of flashing lights come to occupy the vision field. Noises and buzzes fill the drinker’s ears,
and one has the sensation of spinning around. Once ayahuasca takes off, these senses acquire
an extraordinary character: the drinker is said to be able to hear the roar of a jaguar (or the
gossip of people) from miles of distance as well as to discern the human qualities of trees and
animals.
Like ayahuasca experiences, states of drunkenness are similarly characterized by the aban-
donment of one’s normal perception. For the Runa, people who get drunk often act “crazily”
(nusparishca) since they are no longer able to see and hear normally. Their sensorial abil-
ity is weakened. However, unlike in ayahuasca, the perceptual confusion caused by alcohol
intoxication only brings about negative consequences. While during ayahuasca people aban-
don normal perception to acquire a superior perceptual awareness, when drunk people are
deemed unable to think well and are thus susceptible of losing their usual self-restraint
and let strong emotions out, thus causing fights and conflicts. During such states, like in
dream and ayahuasca visions, a person’s soul is more likely to be harmed by some malignant
action from human and nonhuman agents. This suggests that the loss of “normal” percep-
tion endangers the stability of one’s soul which can be attacked and invaded by external
forces.
By explicitly associating smell with such experiences, the Runa point at the capacity of
odors to affect people by changing “normal” perception and inducing a confusional state.
This might have to do not only with the kinds of smells involved but also to the specific
environmental properties of smell. For instance, like auditory phenomena, smells cannot
simply be avoided. Without belonging to a particular visible body, smell propagates and
envelops the perceiver. It may be these characteristics which render smell the perfect vehicle
for supai agency: beings can either “traumatize” a human subject and make him sick or
tempt him into a relationship. In both cases, smell produces a change in the way one
thinks/perceives in ways which parallel alcohol and ayahuasca consumption. By affecting
one’s capacity for distinguishing between different kinds of realities, supai smell opens up
the possibility of abandoning a uniquely human perspective and thus of falling prey to the
world of nonhuman beings. While such uncanny olfactory experiences constitute an initial
point of contact with the supai world, it is necessary to observe that they become truly
dangerous only when followed by dreams.
Dreaming Supai People
Dreaming is, for the Runa, an essential part of life. The Runa sleep in houses without walls or
doors, all together, lying next to each other. Night is certainly not a time for uninterrupted
sleep as people keep waking up throughout the night to tell each other what they have
dreamt. As Eduardo Kohn has beautifully described for the Ávila Runa, at night “dreams
spill into wakefulness and wakefulness into dreams in a way that entangles them both” (2013,
13). And yet, despite the smooth transition from states of wake to those of dreaming and vice
versa, the Runa clearly distinguish the vision they have in dreams (muscuna) from ordinary
vision (ricuna). As elsewhere in Amazonia, the main difference between these two kinds of
“seeing” is the reality they have access to (see Viveiros de Castro [1998] 2012; cf. Peluso
2005). Through dreaming, Runa people are able to see the invisible forms of the world
which are not otherwise perceptible during wake life. Along with ayahuasca, dreaming is a
primary way through which the Runa can see and communicate with nonhuman beings.
For this reason, dreaming is closely associated with shamanism as well as knowledge. The
Runa term for dreaming, “muskuy,” is also used to refer to shamanic vision or prophecies
284 ETHOS
(Whitten and Whitten 2008). Dreams are not conceived by the Runa, as in the Freudian
tradition, to be the expression of unconscious and preconscious thought which stems from
one’s repressed desires and is triggered by psychic events which take place during wake life.
For Runa people, the origins of dreams always lay with others. It is others’ agency—not your
unconscious—which cause you to dream (in Kichwa, muscuchihuanga; see also Bilhaut 2011;
Muratorio 1987).7
To give an example, one day my host Ana and I walked to gather fruits deep near a la-
goon deep in the forest. On the same night, Ana dreamt of a black man sneaking into her
bed. She did not push him away but rather asked him who he was. He answered that he
was her husband. She let him enter into her bed. However, she suddenly regained con-
sciousness and replied that she already had a husband, Jorge. Then she suddenly woke
up and told me the dream. She said that the supai living in the lagoon had “made her
dream.”
This understanding of dreaming is underscored by a particular ontology of the self. Runa

people claim that all beings—including stones, animals, and forest spirits—possess one or
more souls (alma). In dream, these souls can travel freely from one place to another. Because
of this free circulation of souls, dreaming is conceived as a fundamental source of knowledge.
Through dreaming, people have access to the world of animals and other nonhuman entities
with which they establish a dialogue. Such encounters are an important source of knowledge
(yachai) and simultaneously a delicate and dangerous affair. For instance, in a dream told me
by a young boy, he was given a shiny sword from his dead grandfather. The grandfather told
him the sword would keep him safe from the attacks of enemies. Since then, he often dreams
of the sword and attributes his strength and well-being to it. Another friend of mine, a man
in his fifties, told me once that he had recently woken up amidst an uncontrollable fear. He
had dreamt that a stranger had stolen the feathered headdress he usually wore in his dreams.
He understood the removal of the headdress as an attack on his vital force and promptly
sought a shaman to find out who had harmed him. As a state in which souls migrate from
one place to another, dreaming constitutes both an opportunity to acquire knowledge as
well as a threat to one’s strength and vitality.
It is within this dream world dominated by predation that supai make their appearance.
They are often ambivalent figures. They look like white or foreign people and inhabit large
underground cities. They can give advice and help the dream to heal from a disease or to
guide them. On the other hand, supai can also attempt to seduce the human dreamer by
offering some food or inviting him to visit the supai world. For instance, Juan recalls a dream
he had in which a supai girl invited him to pack his clothes and follow her along a path
made of flowers. He said that he was about to walk off with her because the flowers were
blossoming and sweet-smelling but, all of a sudden, his younger sister, who was sleeping
nearby, woke up and hugged him tightly. He then woke up too and could not fall back
asleep again. Thinking retrospectively, Juan said his sister had in fact “rescued” him by
impeding his departure to the supai world where the girl wanted to bring him. Writing
about the Yanesha of the Peruvian Amazon, Santos-Granero (2003) writes that household
heads repeatedly wake everyone up at night to prevent their souls being captured by dream
enemies. Here a similar assumption seems to be at work: Juan’s sister intervenes to rescue
her brother from the dangerous dream by waking him up. Indeed, the intervention of
kin during dreamtime is frequent. Pablo, the other young man who met a supai woman,
told me that he had a dream in which he was sitting with his parents together with the
supai girl’s kin. They were happily chatting and laughing together. Pablo felt very happy
as he deeply loved the supai girl. However, when the girl’s mother offered manioc beer
to his parents, they steadily refused to drink it. Pablo suddenly woke up feeling upset and
resentful of his parents’ rejection. “They did it to help me,” he said; “but I felt very angry at
them.”
In this ethnographic example, Pablo’s parents do not wake him up directly but, by refusing
to drink, they explicitly reject the relationship with supai beings. The Runa often insist that
it is important not to drink or eat any food received in dream: to do otherwise will likely lead
to illness or transformation into a nonhuman form. In this particular case, the acceptance of
manioc beer by Pablo’s parents would have stipulated an agreement between them and the
supai world, and Pablo’s soul would have been irremediably lost. In both instances, kin action
is what forces the two young boys to return to wake life and thus to recognize themselves
as kin, as humans. Such examples forcefully point to another essential characteristic of supai
encounters: the “lonely” condition of the human perceiver. In the next section, I consider
the quality of being alone in relation to the perception of supai and Runa understandings of
the self.
An Ecology of Selves
As my ethnography has shown, encounters with supai beings only occur within a specific
“ecological” condition: when someone is without human company, usually deep in the forest.
This solitary experience is what differentiates the experience of perceiving other invisible
entities, such as ghosts, from supai. While the former can manifest themselves to multiple
people simultaneously, the encounter with a supai is always an experience, an intimate one-
to-one meeting between a human and a nonhuman. However, the solutions to counteract
supai agency can only work if they are collectively orchestrated by fellow human beings: as
the dream examples I discussed above demonstrate, only a concerted human effort (i.e., the
intervention of relatives) can prevent people from falling prey to supai beings. The reason
as to why this might be so has to do, I believe, with the specific ontological status of supai
beings.
Ghosts, the other invisible entity which sometimes appear to Runa people, have no specific
independent existence from humans. Ghosts are dead people, transient traces of a past human
life. While some Runa may concede that ghosts live in a place called “hell,” ghosts are not
thought to lead a human-like life in an alternative reality. When explicitly asked, Runa
people evasively answer to the questions about the details of ghosts’ world. Nobody really
knows or thinks about it much. On the contrary, most Runa have clear ideas about supai
reality. Unlike ghosts, supai have bodies and an existence independent to those of humans.
286 ETHOS
It is because of this specific ontological status as powerful beings living in another world and
possessing another body that they can deeply affect humans. The solitary character of supai
encounters thus needs to be located in a specific understanding of the self which has been
famously described as “perspectivist” by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ([1998]
2012). A main tenet of the Amazonian perspectivist model is that, while the soul is conceived
by Amazonian people to be the same for all beings, what makes each species different is their
body. As Luis Costa and Carlos Fausto put it, “the common soul guarantees that each species
sees itself as human, sharing in human culture and language, but different bodies ensure that
each species sees others differently” (2010, 94). It is exactly because of this common “soul”
or “culture” that the risk of transforming into “other” is always latent. As a human status
depends exclusively on bodily habits and behaviors (and not on an abstract human soul), it
needs to be constantly maintained through the sharing of foods, substances, and through
specific “human” practices (Vilaça 2002).
Within this perspective then, one can understand why Runa people only experience supai
beings when alone. Being alone is a moment in which humans are most susceptible to falling
prey to a kind of ontological confusion. No supai can succeed in seducing a human when
she or he is surrounded by fellow human beings.8 This is because the presence of others
guarantees her solid place as a human amongst others. Carlos Fausto (2007) has argued that
this is exactly the point of commensality in Amazonia: eating together ensures that a similar
point of view is shared, that everyone sees food as the same unambiguous object.
We can view thus parental interventions as ways to ensure that a human perspective is
maintained. Let us take the example of Pablo, who had a long-lasting love story with a
supai woman (which resulted in his temporary disappearance in the forest mentioned at
the beginning of this article). When his parents finally found out, they forbid him from
going hunting alone. His two younger brothers always went with him. In addition, every
morning his grandmother rubbed his body with paint, wild garlic, and creolin. The smell,
she assured me, would keep the supai at bay. Pablo’s grandmother was literally making his
body “human”— and thus different from that of a supai—through smell. Similarly, Juan
sister’s action of waking him up described earlier could be considered as powerful way to
restore his human perspective. At this regard, it is important to notice that dangerous dreams
such as the ones mentioned in the previous section can be “neutralized” or “controlled” by
sharing them with other people. Dream encounters with supai beings are in fact a threat only
if they are kept for one’s self, that is, not subject to the perspectives of fellow human beings.
While so far I have emphasized the dangers of meeting supai, I should stress that if such
encounters are properly managed—that is, shared with other fellow human beings—they
acquire an immense value. As among other societies in Amazonia, someone who entertains
a relationship with forest beings is said to receive gifts of meat or fish and to acquire some
extraordinary knowledge. This productive dimension of supai encounters, whereby these
latter bestow humans with gifts of game, should not be overlooked as it highlights the
profound relationship which exists between perception and action (Ingold 2000): it is in
fact only within the practical activities of hunting, fishing, and gathering in the forest that
supai emerge. The perception of supai is inextricable from the tropical landscape and the
“cosmic food-web” (Arnhem 1996) in which humans and nonhumans are embedded: indeed,
it is no coincidence that urban areas are places where, according to the Runa, supai cannot
exist.
Finally, there is another issue which is essential for understanding the perception of supai
beings among the Runa: the relationship between corporeal transformation and learning. As
I mentioned earlier, supai being are not perceived equally by all people. Although all Runa
can experience supai beings, not everyone does it with the same intensity or frequency. This
is not because some people are thought to be innately predisposed to experiencing supai but
rather because such persons have undergone a specific bodily training or transformation. As
we will see in the next section, it is this kind of corporeal learning which makes the difference
in perception.
Learning to Meet a Supai: Transforming the Body

In the aftermath of Pablo’s disappearance with the supai woman, his family gathered in
his parents’ house. The recent happenings were, of course, the central topic of conversa-
tion. Pouring manioc beer in Pablo’s drinking bowl, his grandmother stood in front of him
and sighed that she knew all too well that one day he could have been taken away. She
continued, addressing Pablo’s father and mother: “We raised him (huiñachishca) with diet
(sasihuan); the supai could smell that! His body only smelled of forest!” The statement—
upon which everyone silently agreed—referred to Pablo’s every day practice of fasting,
which he had undertaken since he was a small child. “Diet” (sasi) is a word which denotes
a period of a specific bodily regimen which includes, among other things, the drinking
of herbal concoctions, abstinence from sexual relationships, baths in cold water, and self-
instigated vomiting. These practices are carried out in the intimacy of the house, alone
or in the company of family members, and are considered to be part of normal daily
life.
While many of such practices were once common for apprentice shamans, they are not,
by any means, restricted to them only. Many Runa undertake these practices as a means
to strengthen their bodies and be able to carry out activities such as hunting, gardening,
and so on. These techniques du corp, to use the Maussian expression, aim to make one
“strong” (sinchi) and “knowledgeable” (yachayuc). They work by affecting one’s samai, life
force. The vital force everyone is born with is gradually accrued by the ingestion and
penetration of other vital substances. This kind of somatic learning is based upon a specific
understanding of the body as a fluid, permeable entity capable of incorporating the qualities
or “vitalities” of other beings, including plants, objects, and animals. This is what Santos-
Granero called a “constructional approach” to selfhood, whereby people are understood as
“resulting from the creational, generative, and socializing contributions of a variety of human
and nonhuman entities and, therefore, as possessing compound anatomies and subjectivities”
(2012, 181).
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This is a pattern of personhood widespread in Amazonian societies. As mentioned above,

in Amazonia, bodies are conceived as the locus of a human perspective and as such, they
are constantly shaped and modified by various techniques which include tattooing, facial
painting, the ingestion of substances, and so on. As Cecilia McCallum puts it “all the myriad
materials that impinge upon or enter the child’s body, whether in a controlled fashion or
simply through chance contact, form its particular individuality” (1996, 354). People thus
become knowledgeable through bodily modifications, substance ingestion, and other kinds of
somatic practices. For instance, Runa people periodically drink infusions made of medicinal
plants, which are thought to be “strong,” to acquire some of their strength. As elsewhere in
Amazonia, these body modifications are understood as a kind of learning or training.
This does not mean that other forms of learning are not acknowledged. For instance, Runa
people highly appreciate the role played by observation and imitation in becoming pro-
ductive and skilled members of society. It is thought, for instance, that pottery making (a
female occupation) can be learned by watching and imitating other women. Young boys
are thought to learn hunting by observing closely the movements and techniques of more
experienced hunters as well as by paying attention to animal behavior. However, for all these
cases, the Runa also strongly emphasize the role played by other kinds of “learning.” For in-
stance, when talking about their experiences of learning pottery making, many skilled potters
mention, as a professional turning point, the dream encounter with mangallpa apamama, the
“grandmother” and owner of Clay. This dream appearance is considered foundational to be-
coming a master potter. While acknowledging “normal” learning, the Runa generally think
that “extraordinary knowledge” (Santos-Granero 2006, 67)—that which happens through
intercession of one’s soul or vital force—is far more important than everyday learning. This
extraordinary kind of learning which happens in dream or via bodily exchange is what makes
the difference in the perception of supai beings.
A training by smell is one of these extraordinary practices which predispose Runa people
to the experiences of supai. When Pablo’s grandmother in the opening paragraph of this
section referred to the good smell Pablo’s body had developed, she referred to a specific
“olfactory” training which some Runa people undergo as early as after birth. For instance,
when a baby is born, he is readily bathed with a bitter, pungent-smelling plant known as
tzicta. This is thought to remove the unpleasant smell associated with childbirth blood which
is said to accumulate inside the baby’s body and harm him. Every time a baby is born then,
he and the people who are present at his birth are thoroughly washed with tzicta. This initial
olfactory training (which happens to most babies) can be continued throughout childhood
and adolescence through the daily practice of bathing with herbal plants. Ingestion of bitter
plants as well as the avoidance of particular strong-smelling foods make the body smell good.
In a document written by some Runa indigenous leaders on shamanic apprenticeship, sasi
was described as a means through which the body acquires “the same breath and smell of
plants. The smell of the forest.”
According to the Runa, dreaming too is a capacity which can be developed. During my
fieldwork, I recall feeling slightly embarrassed when asked enthusiastically about what I had
dreamt at night. I was usually only able to recall only a few fragments of my dreams and,
often, none at all. In any case, the narrations of even my most vivid dreams only lasted a
few minutes.9 My Runa friends instead narrated their dreams in a very vivid manner, giving
lengthy descriptions and punctuating their stories with details. And they did so on a daily
basis! Among the Runa, since an early age, everyone is encouraged to dream and share their
dreams. In addition to nocturnal dream telling, people continue to discuss dreams at dawn,
during daily tasks and even, in case of a particularly significant dream, after days. I interpreted
my lack of dreaming abilities as a cultural deficiency: I obviously had not developed the skills
necessary to be a good dreamer.
My Runa friends, however, did not attribute my poor dreaming skills to my lack of familiarity
with certain nocturnal practices—the repeated waking up throughout the night and the
constant telling of dreams—but to a lack of samai (vital force). This could be reinforced
only through a corporeal “training” which involved, among other things, the inhalation of
tobacco juice and the drinking of dream-inducing plants. Santos-Granero similarly describes
how the Yanesha of the Peruvian Amazon use certain herbal vaporizations to cultivate one’s
self-awareness during dreams. Anthropologist Anne-Gaël Bilhaut (2011), who has worked
with Zapara people in Amazonian Ecuador, compiled a list of practices which the Zapara
undertake to have “clearer” dreams, including the use of plant concoctions, fasting, and
other bodily techniques which strengthen one’s samai. Learning to dream, in other words,
from a Runa perspective, does not happen through techniques du corps such as collective
remembering of dreams, repeated nocturnal awakenings, and the like but rather, through
somatic, “extraordinary” means: the acquisition of vital force from plants, tobacco, and so on.
Equally, in the above-mentioned example of olfactory training, the Runa don’t understand
the process of learning through smell as a practice of association—learning to “associate”
some smells with some contexts/phenomenona (although they might not necessarily deny
that learning also occurs this way)—but rather they understand smell as engendering a real
transformation.
From an analytical perspective, the practices explored so far sit uncomfortably within a
learning paradigm. While it is easy to see why continuous interruptions of sleep, the daily
recollection of dreams, and so on constitute effective techniques for developing self-
awareness and for remembering one’s dreams, it is more difficult to make sense of the
claim that, through specific substances, people learn to dream. What I want to emphasize,
concisely, is that this specific Runa understanding of learning escapes our paradigm for
thinking about processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission. Even models which
acknowledge that learning is a form of bodily enskillment, such as Bourdieu’s (1977) or
Mauss’ (1950 [1935]), cannot account for the kind of learning which, for the Runa as for
many other Amazonian indigenous people, takes place through the transfer of substances or
the modifications of the body and soul.
The question which I want to ask here is: how can people learn about supai beings through
this specific learning? Or, turning the question upside down: how do specific theories of
learning inform Runa ability to perceive supai? To go beyond considering such claims as
290 ETHOS
metaphors, we need to think about the ways in which such bodily modifications do in fact
constitute a kind of perceptual training.
This is a difficult question to answer. Anthropologists working on the relationship between

learning and religion have generally explored how people learn to perceive religious entities
through specific techniques. For instance, in her path-breaking study on learning to hear the
voice of God, Tanya Luhrmann (2012) shows how a specific cultivation of attention to one’s
inner self helps Evangelicals to experience God as present. In particular, she shows how
such sensorial perception of God is actively learned through the technique of prayer which
“manipulates the way the person praying attends to his or her own mind” (Luhrmann and
Morgain 2012, 33). Is there something about the Runa corporeal training which parallels
what Luhrmann describes with regards to prayer technology?
At a first glance, the Amazonian context I have described so far couldn’t be more different
from the Evangelical case. Here, we have no institutionalized religion, and Runa people,
unlike American Evangelicals, do not “strive” to perceive spiritual entities. Furthermore,
none of the training practices which I identified as influencing supai perception explicitly
aim to “teach” the Runa to perceive supai beings; rather, these techniques aim to shape strong
bodies and life forces which, in turn, result in characteristics that are thought to attract supai
beings.10 The main difficulty here is that encounters with spirits seem to happen effortlessly.
In a comment to Luhrmann’s work, Aparecida Vilaça, who works among the ‘Wari of the
Brazilian Amazon, elaborates exactly on this point. Describing the perception of invisible
jaguars during a shamanic ritual, Vilaça argues that among the ‘Wari, “shamans do not
undergo perceptual training” (2013, 361). In her reply to Vilaça’s commentary, Luhrmann
insists that, even among the ‘Wari, where people do not doubt the existence of invisible
entities, there must be “some kind of sensory training” (2013, 390).
I think that among the Runa there is some kind of sensory training involved in the perception
of supai as Luhrmann suggests, but the form of this training might transcend our common
understanding of learning (hence Vilaça’s claim that nobody learns about spirits; indeed,
like the ‘Wari, none of my Runa friends undergo perceptual “training” straightforwardly
recognizable as “learning”). The model described by Luhrmann (2013), for which religious
practice is about learning to experience the mind in a different way, is underscored by a
notion of personhood where the limits between the self and the external world are clearly
demarcated and learning is thus commonly conceived as a process of incorporating outside
knowledge in the brain. Among the Runa, where the boundaries between the body and
external agents are understood as being permeable, learning is not thought of as a process
by which information from the outside is processed into the brain but rather is a corporeal
change which affects the entire organism or parts of it.11 Again, the issue here seems to
revolve around the question of whether such a different understanding of personhood can
affect the way one effectively learns to experience forest spirits.
While I have no easy answer to this question, I believe that attention, and in particular,
“self-attention,” may play a key role in learning to experience supai. Self-attention could
be defined, in the words of Jason Throop, as “an attention shaped according to personal
and cultural dictates so as to affect the ways in which he or she monitors and interprets
changes in his or her bodily sensations and functions” (2012, 413). Bodily practices such
as the ingestion of herbal concoctions, ritual vomiting, and smell therapies shape Runa
self-attention in a specific way. Runa “fasting” is not only a way to train the senses or to
“fine-tune” attention towards the “outside” (or what we might perceive as “outside”),12 but
importantly, fasting is also a way to learn to experience yourself in a very distinct mode.
All the practices which compose sasi—herbal vaporizations, ingestion of liquid substances,
abstinence from eating strong-smelling foods, and so on—center on the penetrability and
the porosity of corporeal boundaries. If one learns to perceive one’s body and one’s soul
as fluid and permeable, always subject to penetration and attacks, this is how she might
come to experience it. In other words, I suggest that through practices which invite the
perception of the body as open, one eventually ends up by having an “open” body. There
is more: within this process, not only is one’s personhood felt as “open,” but others—those
who makes up the “environment”—are also perceived as fluid and penetrable. Indeed, when
Vilaça comments that “only the self-contained individual as a starting point enables us to
ask questions such as: is the intimate relation with God a hallucination (God is just mind) or
a real dialogue (God is a real exterior being)?” (2013, 361), she is correct: this is a question
no Runa would even conceive. It in this sense, in the recognition of one’s self and others’ as
mutually impinging that we can understand animism, of which the supai experience forms
part, as developing a “mutual attention” (Ingold 2013, 32).
Conclusions
In this article, I explored Runa encounters with forest spirits through a phenomenological
perspective. In what I have called an ecology of spiritual perception, I showed how spirits
become manifest through two main sensory modalities, smelling and dreaming. I have also
argued that encounters with supai need to be located within a specific way of inhabiting the
forest.
In the second part of the article, I pointed out that those who are more likely to encounter
supai beings are people who have undergone a period of ritual “fasting.” This, I argued, has
to do with the specific learning which occurs during practices of sasi and, in particular, to the
development of a certain feeling in which one perceives himself as “open” to the agencies of
others. I believe this observation prompts the need, as Diana Espirito Santo wrote, of “not
just taking local ontological assumptions seriously . . . but also [of] recognizing that such
ontologies may have effects beyond epistemology” (2012, 254).
Many questions remain to be addressed, but one, in particular, seems urgent. Through sasi
and other practices, the Runa seem to cultivate an awareness that one’s body is inherently (and
dangerously) permeable to the agencies of others. This emphasis on the porosity of corporeal
boundaries is well documented all over indigenous Amazonia (McCallum 1996; Rosengren
2006; Santos-Granero 2012; Walker 2013). Since I have spoken about the practices of sasi
as engendering a transformation, a question logically follows: does my assertion imply that
292 ETHOS
the feeling of a “bounded” personhood is the starting point from which develops a more
porous, “open” experience? In other words, is it correct to assume a feeling of boundedness
as the default condition of human beings?
If one turns to recent trends in embodied cognition, the answer seems to be negative.
Gibsonian approaches to psychology as well as theories of enactivism (Chemero 2009;
Noë 2009; Varela, Thomson, and Rosch 1991) unanimously share the conviction that no
straightforward separation between the self and the environment can be assumed. Since the
self is constituted by the continuous material interactions with the environment, no person
can be said to be impervious to the effects of others.
Given this evidence and comparing my experience with that of my Runa friends, I wonder
how it is that the anthropologist (and presumably other people from the culture she belongs)
can feel relatively impermeable to certain external agencies. With this assertion I do not
wish to draw a clear-cut distinction between Western experiences of boundedness and a
non-Western “open” personhood —a distinction which Melford Spiro (1993) famously
criticized long ago—or to suggest that the latter is an inherently more desirable attitude. As
my own ethnography shows, among the Runa, we witness to an omnipresent preoccupation
with “closing” the body to avoid unwanted transformations. At the same time, it would be
hazardous to claim that Western experiences of personhood are intrinsically characterized
by a feeling of immunity to “external” agents. The question could then be reframed as
such: how does the anthropologist learn to feel relatively impermeable to certain entities,
for instance smells, spirits,and dreams? What kinds of corporeal practices foster such an
experience? And, on a more general level, what is the relationship between spirit perception
and conceptions of personhood?
Exploring the ways in which people learn to feel “contained,” so to speak, and invulner-
able to certain phenomena (but not others) seems to be a promising departure for inves-
tigating further spiritual encounters. Tracing how the experience of a bounded “mind”
(Makari 2015) is shaped by everyday bodily techniques and practices of attention is not only
ethnographically interesting but also ethically important, since this very familiar notion of
personhood is often the yardstick by which we measure others’ experiences of mind and
body and the “reality” of their worlds.
FRANCESCA MEZZENZANA is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and

Conservation at the University of Kent.
Notes
Acknowledgements. This article was completed with the support of a Fyssen fellowship held at the Laboratoire
d’Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France. I am thankful to the Economic and Social Research Council in
the United Kingdom, which founded my fieldwork in Ecuador, and to the Society of Psychological Anthropology,
for awarding me an International Early Career Travel Grant to present my research at the Biennal Meetings in
New Orleans. I presented an earlier draft of this article at the Seminaire d’Anthropologie Pragmatique organized
by Andrea-Luz Gutiérrez Choquevilca at the Sorbonne. I thank her and the seminar participants for their
insightful comments. My acknowledgements also go to Edward Lowe, Tanya Luhrmann, and two anonymous
reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and remarks. Finally, this article could not have been written without
the generosity of many Runa friends in Puyo and along the Bobonaza who shared with me their experiences of
encounters with supai.
1. This article is based upon ethnographic materials gathered during 30 months of fieldwork in rural communities
in the Pastaza region of Amazonian Ecuador. Runa people from this area live mostly on subsistence agriculture,
fishing, and hunting as well as some informal labor.
2. Until two generations ago, most people in the Bobonaza area lived in their purina, occasionally visiting the
mission centers/schools. Today, the most isolated purina outposts are occupied for long periods of time only
during the school vacations.
3. For a more complete account of Amazonian cosmologies, one can refer to the works by Philippe Descola (2013),
Fernando Santos-Granero (2012), Terence Turner (2009), Viveiros de Castro ([1998] 2012), or the exhaustive
review of animist ontologies by Costa and Fausto (2010).
4. While certain sounds—such as acute cries, human-like whistles, and some bird calls—were also understood as
manifestations of supai, most of the Runa I know emphasize far more the experiences of smelling and dreaming.
For an in-depth study about the relationship between sound and supai perception among the Runa of Peru, see
Gutierrez Choquevilca (2017).
5. The corona is also the place where shamans breathe to infuse the person with their vital force.
6. Ayahuasca was traditionally used by Runa shamans to perform healing rituals. During ayahuasca visions, shamans
were able to see the origins of the illness and to suck it out from the patient’s body (Chango 1984). While traditionally
a shamanic practice, today ayahuasca is prepared and drunk by lay Runa people.
7. Usually it is people with dream power, such as shamans, forest spirits, animals, or even powerful objects, which
cause one to dream. While some dreams may not have any clear “author” behind it (for example, in the case of
omen dreams), most are thought to be caused by one’s soul encounter with other beings.
8. As noticed by other Amazonianist ethnographers, it is the loneliness of the hunter which makes him prone to
seduction by nonhuman spirits (Opas 2005; Santos-Granero 2012, 203).
9. There is ample evidence in lucid-dreaming literature that such techniques enhance the quality and length of
dreaming and thus that anyone can “train” into lucid dreaming (LaBerge and Rheingold 1990).
10. It could be argued from another perspective that such bodily techniques are purposefully undertaken to attract
supai beings since the relationship with a supai, if managed carefully, can bring about positive outcomes. Shamans,
for instance, are able to entertain relationships with supai without losing sight of their own humanity and receive,
in exchange, special knowledge.
11. This does not mean that, for instance, Evangelical Christians do not learn through the body (indeed Luhrmann’s
ethnography shows that it is exactly through embodied practices that they come to experience God), but rather
that, given their assumptions about the nature of personhood, the training techniques deployed in the process
necessarily pivot on mental states.
12. Following this observation, we should be careful not to understand “ecology” as referring to the “world outside”
(Ingold 2000, 17) but rather, as Ingold writes, citing Bateson, as “organism plus environment” (Bateson [1973] in
Ingold 2000, 18).
294 ETHOS
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AN ECOLOGY OF SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION 275

Encountering Supai: An Ecology of Spiritual

To return to my proposed ecology of spiritual experience: my approach starts from a simple

Smell Like a Supai Spirit

Dreaming Supai People

This understanding of dreaming is underscored by a particular ontology of the self. Runa

Learning to Meet a Supai: Transforming the Body

This is a pattern of personhood widespread in Amazonian societies. As mentioned above,

This is a difficult question to answer. Anthropologists working on the relationship between

FRANCESCA MEZZENZANA is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and

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